An artist’s book exploring photographic instability, deep time and perception through ninety-seven variations of a single image.
Old Tjikko is an artist’s book by Danish visual artist Nicolai Howalt, and an entirely singular publication in which all ninety-seven images are made from the same photographic negative. At once a book about the oldest known living organism and a meditation on the instability of the photographic image, it considers the strange entanglement of time, reality and perception. The subject is Old Tjikko, a 9,600-year-old spruce tree standing in a remote mountainside landscape in Dalarna, Sweden, and believed to be the world’s oldest tree.
Using a single negative of this remarkable tree, Howalt printed the image onto ninety-seven different sheets of expired analogue photographic paper, some dating back to the 1940s. In doing so, he incorporated the unpredictability of long-aged materials as an active and essential element in the making of each image. The result is a sequence of ninety-seven variations on the same motif, ranging from dense blacks to spectral whites, in which uncontrolled silver halides produce effects resembling meteor showers, heavy mist or other near-organic disturbances. Questioning the assumed permanence of the photographic image, the work reveals how the material condition of paper subtly but profoundly shapes perception, while these imperfections seem to open brief windows onto distant and disjunctive times. Dormant traces are reawakened in the present, and the recently exposed negative holds a momentary image of a tree that itself embodies the passage of almost unimaginable millennia.
The book includes essays by mycologist Henning Knudsen, philosopher Søren Gosvig Olesen and art historian Lars Kiel Bertelsen, situating the work within the contexts of natural science, biology, the philosophy of perception and the history of photography.
Third edition of 1,000 copies.
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Title: Old Tjikko
Artist: Nicolai Howalt
Publisher: Fabrikbooks, 2019
Essays: Henning Knudsen, Associate Professor Emeritus of Mycology, Natural History Museum of Denmark; Søren Gosvig Olesen, Associate Professor in Philosophy, University of Copenhagen; Lars Kiel Bertelsen, Associate Professor in Art History, Aarhus University
Book Design: Rasmus Koch Studio
Print: Narayana Press
Format: Hardcover, silver-gilded edges
Size: 166 × 225 mm
Pages: 224
Plates: 97
Language: English
Edition: Third edition of 1,000 copies
ISBN: 978-87-998207-5-7
